My Only Friend, The End

A. E. Housman

At first glance nothing seems more unlikely than that the poet of the enormously popular A Shropshire Lad should be the classical scholar A. E. Housman. This Cambridge University professor of Latin left no doubt as to his priorities: the emendation of classical texts was both an intellectual search for the truth and his life's work; poetry was an emotional and physiological experience that began with a sensation in the pit of the stomach. The apparent discrepancies in this man who became both a first-rate scholar and a celebrated poet should be a reminder that, whatever else poetry does, it also records the interior life, a life that has its roots well beneath the academic gown or the business suit. Furthermore, in Housman's case, though he did aspire to be a great scholar first, scrutiny of his life and work reveals that he valued poetry more highly than he often admitted and that many of the presumed conflicts between the classical scholar and the romantic poet dissolve in the personality of the man.

Though the modern student is usually more interested in Housman's poetry than his textual criticism, some survey of his scholarship is important for an appreciation of his overall contribution and of the cast of mind that could be so devoted—and so imperious—in the search for truth. From his early work on Propertius at Oxford University through his professorship at University College, London, and culminating in his office as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge University, Housman was not interested in the interpretation of the works of the classical writers he treated. Instead, he was solely involved in the establishment of reliable texts of their works. This process usually required the peeling away of centuries of error made by previous editors, whom Housman frequently treated with unmitigated scorn. In "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism," a paper presented to the Classical Association at Cambridge in 1921 and collected in John Carter's 1961 edition of the writer's prose, Housman described textual criticism as both a science and an art, requiring reason and common sense. As a science, however, it was not exact, he declared: "A textual critic engaged upon his business is not at all like Newton investigating the motion of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas." Housman railed against the prevailing practice of accepting earlier manuscripts as better manuscripts or of accepting all readings—however inane—within a manuscript simply because of the authority of the whole. In this regard he criticized scholars for being lazy, and this tone of moral rectitude permeated the entire paper. Many scholars, he said, are stupid, lazy, vain—or all three. His last sentence put a cap on it: "Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders, and brains, not pudding, in your head."

Concerning Housman's own reputation as a classical scholar, D. R. Shackleton Bailey in a 1959 Listener article said that he was "beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time." Bailey spoke of the scholar's "passionate zeal to see each one of the innumerable problems in his text not as others had presented it or as he might have preferred it to appear but exactly as it was." Housman's greatest single textual work was his five-volume edition of the Astronomica of Manilius, a first century A.D. Latin poet. The first volume of this work was published in 1903 and the last in 1930. That Housman chose Manilius, a second-rate poet, over Propertius or any of the other better writers with whom he was familiar reveals his desire to establish for himself an unassailable reputation, for as Andrew S. F. Gow declared in A. E. Housman, the scholar realized that the Astronomica of Manilius provided him the greatest opportunity "of approaching finality in the solution of the problems presented." In a letter to Housman's biographer Graves, G. P. Goold, a later holder of the Latin chair at University College, summed up the scholar's accomplishments: "The legacy of Housman's scholarship is a thing of permanent value; and that value consists less in obvious results, the establishment of general propositions about Latin and the removal of scribal mistakes, than in the shining example he provides of a wonderful mind at work.... He was and may remain the last great textual critic.... And if we accord [Richard] Bentley the honour of being England's greatest Latinist, it will be largely because Housman declined to claim the title for himself."

It was at University College that Housman experienced his most sustained period of poetry composition, and the main fruit of this period was the publication of A Shropshire Lad in 1896. First offered to Macmillan Company in 1896 under the title "Poems by Terence Hearsay," A Shropshire Lad was rejected by that publisher: it was subsequently brought out in the same year by Kegan Paul, with the change in the title suggested by Housman's friend Pollard. The book was published at the author's own expense, and he insisted that he receive no royalties. There wouldn't have been many anyway, since Kegan Paul printed only five hundred copies, and, as Maude M. Hawkins noted in A. E. Housman: Man Behind a Mask, the book "sold so slowly that Laurence Housman at the end of two years bought up the last few copies." Though the volume was better appreciated in the United States than in England—Hawkins called most of the critical reviews "lukewarm or adverse." A Shropshire Lad did not sell well until it was published by Grant Richards, a man with whom Housman became lifelong friends. Richards's first edition was five hundred copies in 1897, which sold out; he then printed one thousand copies in 1900 followed by two thousand in 1902. Hawkins summed up the volume's early public reception: "After the slow stream of Housman readers from 1896 to 1903, the momentum of popularity increased rapidly. During this period A Shropshire Lad had been reviewed in thirty-three periodicals with both praise and condemnation."

During the twentieth century A Shropshire Lad has been more of a popular than a critical success. Looking back to the heyday of the book's success, George Orwell remarked in Inside the Whale and Other Essays: "Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now [1957] not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of A Shropshire Lad by heart." In accounting for this popularity, Orwell spoke of certain elements in the poetry: a snobbism about belonging to the country; the adolescent themes of murder, suicide, unhappy love, and early death; and a "bitter, defiant paganism, a conviction that life is short and the gods are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young."

In all of his poetry, Housman continually returns to certain favorite themes. The predominant theme, discussed by Cleanth Brooks in the Ricks collection of essays, is that of time and the inevitability of death. As Brooks said, "Time is, with Housman, always the enemy." In the first poem of A Shropshire Lad, "1887," one of the few to be titled, the conventional patriotism of the Queen's jubilee is shot through with the irony that God can only save the Queen with the help of those who have died for her sake: "The saviours come not home tonight: / Themselves they could not save." Housman frequently deals with the plight of the young soldier, and he is usually able to maintain sympathy both for the youth who is the victim of war and for the patriotic cause of the nation. Robert B. Pearsall suggested in a 1967 PMLA essay that Housman dealt frequently with soldiers because "the uniform tended to cure isolation and unpopularity, and soldiers characteristically bask in mutual affection."

It is not only war but nature, too, that brings on thoughts of death in Housman's poetry. In the famous Shropshire Lad lyric beginning "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now," the speaker says that since life is all too short, he will go out "To see the cherry hung with snow," an obvious suggestion of death. In a well-known verse from Last Poems, a particularly wet and old spring causes the speaker to move from a description of nature—"The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers stream from the hawthorn on the wind away"—to a sense that his lost spring brings one closer to the grave, which, in turn, occasions a splenetic remark about the deity: "Whatever brute and blackguard made the world." To his credit, Housman often does not merely wallow in such pessimistic feelings but counsels a kind of stoical endurance as the proper response: "Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale." When the sky cannot be shouldered, a type of Roman suicide may be appropriate, as in "Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?" or in another Shropshire Lad poem, which ends with the lines: "But play the man, stand up and end you, / When your sickness is your soul."

Another frequent theme in Housman's poetry, one that is related to the death motif, is the attitude that the universe is cruel and hostile, created by a God who has abandoned it. In the poem "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" in Last Poems, mercenaries must take up the slack for an uncaring deity: "What God abandoned, these defended, / And saved the sum of things for pay." In such a world where "malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man," as the lyricist wrote in A Shropshire Lad, poetry can serve the purpose of inuring one to the harshness of reality. R. Kowalczyk, in a 1967 Cithara essay, summed up this prevalent theme: "Housman's poetic characters fail to find divine love in the universe. They confront the enormity of space and realize that they are victims of Nature's blind forces. A number of Housman's lyrics scrutinize with cool, detached irony the impersonal universe, the vicious world in which man was placed to endure his fated existence."

Within such a universe, the pastoral theme of the preciousness of youth and youthful beauty is everywhere to be found. In "To an Athlete Dying Young," the youth is praised for leaving a world with his accomplishments intact. Like the young girl Lucy in romantic poet William Wordsworth's lyrics, Housman's youths sometimes die into nature and become part of the natural surroundings: "By brooks too broad for leaping / The lightfoot boys are laid; / The rose-lipt girls are sleeping / In fields where roses fade." But as Brooks declared, as recorded in Ricks's collection of essays, Housman's nature cannot be the same as Wordsworth's after the century's achievement in science: "Housman's view of nature looks forward to our time rather than back to that of Wordsworth. If nature is lovely and offers man delight, she does not offer him solace or sustain him as Wordsworth was solaced and sustained. For between Wordsworth and Housman there interpose themselves Darwin and Huxley and Tindall—the whole achievement of Victorian science."

Furthermore, society sometimes intrudes into Housman's world of nature, and when it does, the rustic youth frequently comes in conflict with it. As Oliver Robinson noted in Angry Dust: The Poetry of A. E. Housman, "Housman is especially sympathetic with the man who is at odds with society, the man who cannot keep 'these foreign laws of God and man.'" In one poem from A Shropshire Lad, the speaker pities the condemned man in Shrewsbury jail whom he calls "a better lad, if things went right, / Than most that sleep outside."

The themes of his poetry and his emotional handling of them mark Housman as an extension of the romantic movement that flourished in England in the early part of the nineteenth century and had a resurgence in the aesthetic movement of the 1890s. The critical evaluation of Housman's work in the two decades after his death in 1936 is tinged with the anti-romanticism of the period. The directness and simplicity of much of Housman's poetry were viewed as faults. In A. E. Housman and W. B. Yeats Richard Aldington reported a rumor that circulated about Cambridge University to the effect that when influential critic I. A. Richards left Housman's Cambridge inaugural lecture he was heard to say: "This had put us back ten years." And Cyril Connolly, in a 1936 New Statesman article reprinted in Ricks's essay collection, said that Housman's poems "are of a triteness of technique equalled only by the banality of thought." He also talked about the limitations of the poet's themes of man's mortality and rebellion against his lot.

To see irony in Housman's poetic technique, however, is to mitigate some of what would otherwise be considered faults: the adolescent nature of some of the thought and the sentimental handling of it. Christopher Ricks, in the essay in his collection on Housman, noted that "everyone seems to take it for granted that Housman's poems unwaveringly endorse the pessimistic beliefs which they assert. To me his poems are remarkable for the ways in which rhythm and style temper or mitigate or criticize what in bald paraphrase the poem would be saying."

Regardless of whether one finds irony in the author's poetic technique, it is true that Housman tried to place some distance between himself and his work. Referring to A Shropshire Lad in a letter written in 1933, Housman stated that "very little in the book is biographical" and said that his view of the world was "owing to my observation of the world, not to personal circumstances." As to the county of Shropshire itself, Housman admitted in a letter to Maurice Pollet: "I was born in Worcestershire, not Shropshire, where I have never spent much time."

In his roles as classical scholar and as poet, Housman exhibited an unswerving integrity. While this integrity served him well in his classical endeavors, in his poetry it may have relegated him to a rank below that of the major poets of his age. His poetry, based as it is on emotion, never went beyond what he could verify with his own feelings. As Edmund Wilson said in an essay appearing in the Ricks collection, "His world has no opening horizons; it is a prison that one can only endure. One can only come the same painful cropper over and over again and draw from it the same bitter moral." But few writers have expressed this dark if limited vision with more poignancy and clarity than Housman.

According to John Bayley in the London Review of Books, Housman was "a scholar worshipped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly." "He was certainly pugnacious and opinionated, as well as elegant and intellectually fastidious," concurred Peter Levi in The Spectator. These attributes emerge in A. E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. The collection includes textual criticism, comic verses and poetry, and letters. "Although Housman's distinctive blend of sadness and savagery seems dated and unappealing, his writings embody certain patriotic and critical attitudes which no student of English culture can fail to ignore," declared Tom Paulin in The Observer.

Barthes and Semiotics

Roland Barthes was one of the earliest structuralist or poststructuralist theorists of culture. His work pioneered ideas of structure and signification which have come to underpin cultural studies and critical theory today. He was also an early instance of marginal criticism. Barthes was always an outsider, and articulated a view of the critic as a voice from the margins. He was an outsider in three ways: he was gay, he was Protestant in a Catholic culture, and he was an outsider in relation to French academic establishment. By the end of his life, however, he was widely renowned both in France and beyond.


Barthes and Semiotics

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. He is often considered a structuralist, following the approach of Saussure, but sometimes as a poststructuralist.

A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth. As with many semioticists, one of Barthes’s main themes was the importance of avoiding the confusion of culture with nature, or the naturalisation of social phenomena. Another important theme is the importance in being careful how we use words and other signs.

One characteristic of Barthes’s style is that he frequently uses a lot of words to explain a few. He provides detailed analyses of short texts, passages and single images so as to explore how they work.

Another trait of his work is his constant systematisation. He draws up schemes for categorising the signs and codes with which he works, which can be applied to divide a text, a narrative or a myth into different parts with different functions. He draws up something like a blueprint of the areas of discourse he studies, showing how the different parts hold together.

In Saussurean analysis, which Barthes largely uses, the distinction between signifier and signified is crucial. The signifier is the image used to stand for something else, while the signified is what it stands for (a real thing or, in a stricter reading, a sense-impression).

The signified sometimes has an existence outside language and social construction, but the signifier does not. Further, the relationship between the two is ultimately arbitrary. There are many different ways a particular signified could be expressed in language, or different objects divided-up. None of these ways is ultimately superior to the others.

Barthes is an anti-essentialist. He is strongly opposed to the view that there is anything contained in a particular signifier which makes it naturally correspond to a particular signified. There’s no essence of particular groups of people (humanity, Britishness) or objects (chairness, appleness) which unifies them into a category or separates them from others.

For instance, there is no such thing as human nature. (This might be taken to mean that everything ultimately exists in an immanent, extensive plane of being). The division into categories is always a process of social construction. People don’t start off with thoughts or perceptions of objects which they then express in language. The categories of language determine how people divide up objects into types.

Furthermore, all signs depend on the entire system of signs. None of them have meaning aside from the system.

Barthes is best-known for showing the social constructedness of language by reference to familiar, everyday experiences.

However, he does not mechanically apply Saussure’s theory. He largely replaces Saussure’s term ‘arbitrary’ with the term ‘motivated’. The relationship between a signifier and a signified is arbitrary only from the point of view of language. From a social point of view, it channels particular interests or desires. It can be explained by reference to the society in which signs operate, and the place of the signs within them. Nothing is really meaningless. Signs are neither irrational nor natural.

Signs are taken to operate on a continuum, from ‘iconic’ with one strong meaning to users, through ‘motivated’, to the truly ‘arbitrary’. They vary along this continuum as to how tightly defined they are. Most signs have strong enough connotations and associations to be at least partly ‘motivated’. When they are used, they refer back to previous conventional uses.

For Barthes, most signs are mediated by language. Barthes usually reads non-linguistic signs (such as fashion) through linguistic signs (such as fashion journalism). He views non-linguistic signs as carrying linguistic meanings.

Indeed, in Barthes’s later work, even actions become mediated by language. Every act is at once an act (signified) and a sign of itself (signifier). It becomes hard to unpack the act from its meaning. For instance, in psychoanalysis, it’s argued that a person might kill or steal to confirm in the eyes of others her or his own sense of being a guilty person. The guilty act is a means to provide a sign of itself.

Barthes believes it is impossible to act (e.g. to dress) ‘innocently’ (in the sense of not conveying anything in terms of meaning). Signs of deviance from dominant norms – punk dress for example, or an archaic religious look – are just as conventional as those of the mainstream. They signify rejection of dominant norms and attachment to particular alternatives.

Signs are often used to differentiate one person or group from others. Taboos, for instance, can create a freedom to reject dominant norms by breaking them. Barthes assumes that acts of signifying are usually ‘guilty’: the image they project is intended.

Furthermore, the way people use language bears little relationship to underlying intent, feelings or perceptions. Beneath each text (whether it’s a novel or a speech-act) is simply the immense structure of the language-system, from which each person borrows words in a ceaseless act of writing.

There are also, however, special cases where meanings are violently projected from outside, as in the Dominici case (see below).

The main disagreement here is with the view of language as something akin to mathematical symbols designating particular objects. This kind of reference is one of the roles of language, known as denotation. However, language-use also tends to be affected by a second type of use, known as connotation. Mistaking connotations for denotations is one of the things which makes conventional uses seem natural.

Barthes opposes the view of arts such as literature as operating in this way. He also opposes the view of language as primarily instrumental – as a way of rationally understanding experience. Instead, language exists to produce sensuality, or sensory responses.

Barthes also disagrees with the view that people first form integrated sense-perceptions or thoughts to which they then give names through language. In common with other structuralists, he sees linguistic categories as constituting the divisions of phenomena into groups.

Barthes’s work is marked by a certain recurring concern for the closure which results from linguistic ways of seeing. Language always implies a one-sided way of seeing, which selects certain characteristics as meaningful, and ignores or discards others. This ‘intellectual imperialism’ or ‘fascism’ is built into the nature of language. Every statement prevents something else from being said. This exclusion is unavoidable.

Furthermore, once said or written, something is unchangeable. It creates a system. It cannot be undone. It can only be questioned. This goes against the openness of language. Derrida is later to suggest it is a kind of violence against the multitude of possible meanings.

Human freedom can be asserted against the nature of language in two ways. Firstly, by calling language into question. This is done by literature and semiotics. Secondly, by opening texts to new readings, and preventing them from being finalised. This is done through ‘writerly reading’, and through forms of writing which escape its restriction to communication, using signs for their own sake.

Mount Tai

望岳

岱宗夫如何
齊魯青未了

造化鍾神秀
陰陽割昏曉

盪胸生層雲
決眥入歸鳥

會當凌絕頂
一覽眾山小


Wang Yue

Dai zong fu ru he?
Qi lu qing wei liao
Zao hua zhong shen xiu
Yin yang ge hun xiao.

Dang xiong sheng ceng yun
Jue zi ru gui niao
Hui dang ling jue ding
Yi lan zhong shan xiao

Gaze Mountain

Tai-tsung then like what?

Chi Lu green never ends

Creator conentrated divine beauty

Northside southside cleave dark brown

Heaving breast are born layered clouds

Bursting eye-sockets enter returning birds

Really must surmount extreme summit

Single glance many mountains little.

Gazing at the Marchmount*

What is it like then, Mount Tai
Over Qi and Lu, endlessly green

Creation gathered divine beauty
North and south dividing dusk and daybreak

Chest heaves at heaped clouds rising
Eye-sockets burst – enter birds returning

Someday I’ll climb to the highest peak
See in one glance all other mountains small.

- Tien Tran 2016

 * Edward H. Schafer's translation of the term yue 嶽 as 'Marchmount,' explained in his Pacing the Void: T'ang Approaches to the Stars, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977: 'My version is based on the ancient belief that these numinous mountains stood at the four extremities of the habitable world, the marches of man's proper domain, the limits of the ritual tour of the Son of Heaven. There was, of course, a fifth—a kind of axial mount in the center of the world' (p.6).

Gazing at Mount Tai

How to describe a peak

that has produced such reverence?

there's the greenness that surrounds it-

two provinces, Qi and Lu

all creation is contained

on those dark slopes, that sunny side

layers of clouds refresh

climber and climbed alike

the birds fly up and up

beyond our straining eyes

someday I want to stand

right there on the summit

the other mountains dwarfed

spreading in all directions

- David Young 2015

Gazing on the Peak

And what then is Daizong like? - 

over Qi and Lu, green unending,

Creation compacted spirit splendors here,

Dark and Light, riving dusk and dawn.

Exhilarating the breast, it produces layers of cloud;

splitting eye-pupils, it has homing birds entering, 

Someday may I climb up to its highest summit,

with one sweeping view see how small all other mountains are.

- Stephen Owen 2015

On a Prospect of T'ai-shan

How is one to describe this king of mountains?

Throughout the whole of Ch-i and Lu one never loses sight of its greenness.

In it the Creator has concentrated all that is numinous and beautiful.

Its northern and southern slopes divide the dawn from the dark.

The layered clouds begin at the climber's heaving chest,

and homing birds fly suddenly within range of his straining eyes.

One day I must stand on top of its highest peak

and at a a single glance see all the other mountains grown tiny beneath me.

- David Hawkes 1965

Gazing at the Marchmount

[the Sacred Peak, Taishan]

Successor Alp - now what is it like?
Over Qi and Lu - greening interminate,
The Creator of CHanges converged divine glory;
Sun- and shadow slopes cleave dusk from dawn.
Heaving the breast, to arouse layered clouds;
Popping the pupils, to send in homing birds,
My time will come to surmount its pinnacle
And, in one view, survey all alps so wee,

- David McCraw 1992

Viewing Mt. Tai


How about old Mt. Tai?
Holding apart Qi and Lu.
Natures bounty elegant,
Slicing YinYang
begetting day and night.
Rocking my bosom
spawning thunderheads,
Scowling
at returning birds.
Approaching the summit
One glance below
Only puny hills!

- Dongbo 東波

Looking at Mount Tai

How is Mountain Tai?
Its green is seen beyond State Qi and State Lu,
a distillation of creation's spirit and beauty.
Its slopes split day into Yin and Yang.
Its rising clouds billow in my chest.
Homecoming birds fly through my wide-open eyes.
I should climb to the summit
and in one glance see all other mountains dwarfed.


- Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping



Gaze Into the Distance at the Five Sacred Mountains

What does one think of the eternal Mt. Tai?
From Qi to Lu green colors without limits
Only deities and Nature can create such elegance
At daybreak one mountainside bright and sunny, the other side in dark shadows, at dusk they trade light and dark like the yin and yang.

Mind-heart emerges, clearing away the overlapping clouds
Out of the corner of my eye, birds come together to enter the mountains
Later I will tower aloft from the highest peak
With one look, numerous small mountains down below.

LES AVENTURES DE ROBERT FORTUNE ou comment le thé fut volé aux Chinois

Phjong

Murray Christmas

Watch of the Week: Brevet Triple Date

The Hippopotamus

Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei et conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic habeo.

S. Ignatii Ad Trallianos.

And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans.

THE BROAD-BACKED hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way—
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ’potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

T.S Eliot

2016

Why Central Banks Should Offer Bank Accounts to Everyone

The World's Longest Palindrome

http://norvig.com/palindrome.html

A man, a plan, a caretaker, a moksha, Lufkin, a jacinth, Gile, Daniell, Ivanov, an odor, a negativeness, a tsarevna, melanomas, an ire, Gib, Olga, Lata Narayanan, a meld, an elecampane, an evonymus, an anatase, Rachael, an anabasis, an anaesthetics, an anamniote, an ani, DRE, Fredra, Cal, Parette, Serang, Isaacs, a ramark, IHD, a nonacademic, an obstet, Sellers, Sanalda, Erbe, Eba, an ane, Zaneski, Red, Erfurt, Sinai, Sale, Gene Roddenberry, a nonactive, Cenaean, Namangan, a mell, Everes, a nonanimal, a sanitarian, a non-American, Gat, Noman, an arista, Lattimer, a nonemendation, Eberta, Poe, LCT, an anaerobe, Ranita, Marella, an antired, ipsissima verba, a nan, a manille, Tiv, a nonet, an one, Kenney, a caret, Alon, Omar Epps, an analemma, an enami, Barents, Regen, A. H. 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Rowen, Adam Alexi-Malle, Haydn, a str, a blighter, a gamone, Dana, ASS, a bargeman, AID, a craneman, Airedale, Davene, Galle, Skee-Ball, Ewer, a fgn, Aron, a leg, Ducasse, Nevis, Iredale, Mara, Calles, Salene, Danyelle, Kootenay, Caron, a scare, Decadron, a praemunire, katana, Mler, epistases, Neman, Oira, MOIG, Adana, Reni, Adron, a sonar, Eddana, Ima, Lahti, Peter Buneman, a weaponeer, Gallinas, Thestor, a baseman, a deadlight, Ronal, Chane, Mai, Shaitan, Giselle, Holle, Hanoi, Tati, Pace, Darelle, Hasseman, Oita, Sil, a gel, Linares, Ubana, Sat, a rom, a nibbana, Sad, Line, Baer, a bdl, an ordn, a sneer, Gayel, Warrenne, Kennan, an afreet, a gelatin, Urbana, Eri, ATS, a der, Freya, Brenner, a wavelet, a cider, Paolo, Pire, Tayler, a matter, a palace, Danelle, Habana, Marabelle, Smithson, a grub, Anson, a guanosine, Basir, Benares, Abana, Eno, Labana, a cabana, Nona, Bellaire, Tamayo, Nov, Anne, Jane Greer, a caner, a cetane, Naara, Manisha Koirala, Shane, Manat, Terra, BLE, Jameson, 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Hirasuna, Munniks, Lion, Assen, Ilion, an aegrotat, Set, Tana, Sin, a sultana, Ira, Mosul, an espagnolette, Sion, a sex, Etana, Sian, a lesion, a cit, Car, a tana, Adler, a manometer, an esne, Rhaetian, a damiana, Son, Essene, Vita, retinas, Une, Meter, a wale, Delora, Cannanore, Macnair, Colette, Romagna, Kistner, a payt, a hobnail, a run-on, a piperonal, Atropatene, Gargan, a tgn, a setter, Giana, Ten, Oca, Jareb, Memnon, an omelette, Docilu, Kan, an eraser, an abseil, Liberace, Dael, Siana, Tiana, an overcare, Diana, Ann, an ign, a why'll, Ier, a byre-man, Amanda Foreman, Agni, Sharon Au, a sesame, Tratner, a peteman, a vale, deciduae, Cro-Magnon, an astr, Australiana, Nore, Liana, Six, Etan, an anode, Cammaerts, Riana, Ariana, Nah, Cai, Danny Dolev, Isar, Briana, a novelette, Lana, Can, Ecbatana, Ino, Meade, Calah, Plana, Mur, Alana, Han, a trepan, a haematin, a rationale, deti, Lear, Sinon, an aid, Ninon, an aminase, Itin, Ukr, a ser, a bastite, Pattin, a rattan, an aero, Belle, Hayti, Lib, AET, Arnon, a sei, Tila, Rene, Georglana, Amr, Edo, Tare, Karel, Dan, a lignocaine, Lenoir, Elana, a tile, Messene, Nolana, Sue, a backscatter, a gateman, a mode, protases, a banat, Sine, Ilana, Nil, Svetlana, a meter, a secretness, Idleman, a rooter, a parasol, Lem, Race, Elora, Candless, Jillana, Asser, a cetin, Allana, Ebeneser, an acetin, a retina, Leman, OIt, a c/o, Vernon, a linac, a dresser, a ctn, a raffle, Sabu, a thane, Gerstner, a bimane, Naam, Melan, an asp, Per, a monolater, a cayenne, Kenon, a tenon, a vitellin, a manana, a brev, a missis, Piderit, Nana, a ller, a matin, a rebore, an anat, Cleopatre, Benoit, Adne, Menon, a remit, Tala, Tsiranana, Montagnac, Ire, Manon, an air, a tin, a salami, Nanon, a sere, Velleman, Agna, Mannaean, Ecevit, Canon, Ayr, Reb, Ned, Dorene, Gelasia, Nistru, Frederiksen, a zenana, a beebread, Lan, ASSR, Elle, Stets, bonaci, Med, a canon, a dhikr, a marasca, a sign, a resetter, a placarder, Ferdinana, ETO, Inman, an asci, Teh, Tse, an ana, Sis, a banana, Leah, Caresa, Tanana, Sumy, novenae, Nap, Mace, Len Adleman, a nay, Ara, Natala, globigerinas, a mon, a leman, Vera, Stassen, Evita, Genaro, Donavon, a villein, a delight, Nica, Janik, Fulahs, Komarek, a ter, a canal, Panama!

Rebels

Su Dongpo

Angela Carter

Watch of the Week: IWC Automatic 36

Super Mario Excel

It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response

The Old World

Mario - TP OK Jazz - Franco Luambo Makiadi

Howard Carter and Tutankhamun's Tomb

Jack Radey

Measurement of the Earth’s rotation: 720 BC to AD 2015

How was the speed of light determined and who found it, when?

Although Galileo was the first person of record to try to determine the speed of light, he was not successful. His experiments took place over terrestrial distances and the timing methods available to him were far to crude to make a successful determination given such distances and the very great speed of light.

It was the Danish astronomer, Olaus Rømer , who, in 1676, first successfully measured the speed of light. His method was based on observations of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter (by Jupiter).

Rømer noted that the observed time interval between successive eclipses of a given moon was about seven minutes greater when the observations were carried out when the earth in its orbit was moving away from Jupiter than when it was moving toward Jupiter. He reasoned that, when the earth was moving away from Jupiter, the observed time between eclipses was increased above the true value (by about 3.5 minutes) due to the extra distance that the light from each successive eclipse had to travel to reach the earth. Conversely, when the earth was moving toward Jupiter, the observed interval between eclipses was decreased (by about 3.5 minutes) because of the decreased distance that the light had to travel on each successive eclipse.

Had the earth not been moving, the light from successive eclipses would have to travel the same distance to the earth, so that the true interval between eclipses would be observed. However, when the earth was moving away from Jupiter, the light had to travel a greater distance to reach the earth from each successive eclipse, and conversely a smaller distance when the earth was moving toward Jupiter. Since the speed of the earth in its orbit was known, the distance that the earth had moved between eclipses could be calculated. The speed of light was then estimated to account for the seven minute overall variation of the observed interval between successive eclipses.

Rømer's estimate for the speed of light was 140,000 miles/second, which is remarkably good (186,282 miles/second) considering the method employed.

Three years' wanderings in the northern provinces of China, including a visit to the tea, silk, and cotton countries; with an account of the agriculture and horticulture of the Chinese, new plants, etc.

IJN Mikasa

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.



Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.



The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.



Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.


EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Lourids Brigge) (1910)

The Shores of Oblivion (1889) Bracht

The Fall of Rome - Auden

The piers are pummelled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves.



Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax-defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.



Private rites of magic send

The temple prostitutes to sleep;

All the literati keep

An imaginary friend.



Cerebrotonic Cato may

Extol the Ancient Disciplines,

But the muscle-bound Marines

Mutiny for food and pay.



Caesar’s double-bed is warm

As an unimportant clerk

Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On a pink official form.



Unendowed with wealth or pity,

Little birds with scarlet legs,

Sitting on their speckled eggs,

Eye each flu-infected city.



Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.

Guan Yu the Immortal